I am a veteran Plex user with minimal technical knowledge.
I currently have my Plex server running on a Synology DS918+, I more often than not watch my media through an Nvidia Shield onto my living room TV and it all works well.
I have a HDHomerun Connect DVR setup and can record from OTA broadcasts. the ‘Convert video while recording’ setting is set to ‘Transcode’. The resulting .TS files are of reasonable quality but are very large. I tend to re-encode them using FFMPEG to X265, I do not notice any quality difference and the file sizes are much smaller (25-30% of the original).
Is there anyway to achieve these smaller file sizes with different hardware. I have a desktop PC with an i5-10400 CPU that supports QSV, if I was to set that up as a second Plex server would I get more/better transcoding options? If I was to add a GPU to the PC/Server would that help things.
I have tried to use a Post Processing script but I get nowhere with that, I get an error ‘An error occurred while postprocessing the recording’ but I cannot find any meaningful errors in any log files. The documentation (or info from Google searches) is not very helpful.
I’m happy to do my own research but I would just like a few pointers to get me started.
I’m sure I was previously able to see the Plex log files in File Station! I assume that they are located somewhere down the same branch as “/volume1/@apphome/PlexMediaServer/Plex Media Server/Scripts” where the post processing scripts are to be located. The only way I could get there was to SSH in and to elevate to root (I did chmod the script to 777)
Rightly or wrongly I have recently upgraded to DSM 7.0 beta and I know from trying to install ffmpeg that Synology have made significant changes to permissions but I don’t see how that should impinge on the visibility of log files or script file locations.
I may have misled you, I absolutely know I can use a seperate PC to build a 2nd Plex server but my aim in doing this is to have another server linked to the same library that would automatically produce Live TV recordings of a more manageable size.
Currently the Live Tv & DVR Device Setting gives the options of ‘Off’ or ‘Transcode’ (this is on the DS918+), if I had better hardware (maybe with a GPU) would I get more transcoding options.
No. The transcode while recording option (mpeg2 to H264) is a cpu only process and not advisable given the processor on the NAS.
Best results would probably be achieved by using the PC as a 2nd server to record with a post processing script that does the conversion you want and then move the file to the NAS’s TV Library.
